Distinction without a difference. They pirated books for the purpose of using them to train their models.
The noteworthy thing here, IMO, is the judge seems to have explicitly stated that using legally-acquired works to train AI models falls under fair use.
I think it's a significant distinction. The original title implies that the training was illegal when the court actually found that the training was fair use. It implies that Anthropic was required to ask the professors for permission to train on their books.
What the actual ruling found was that the professors should have been paid some tens of dollars for 1 copy of their book.
(Whether you agree with it or not is another matter)
How does it open the door to that? That's literally the argument that was rejected by saying the fair use defense only counts for the legally-acquired media.
> “Like any reader aspiring to be a writer, Anthropic’s LLMs trained upon works not to race ahead and replicate or supplant them — but to turn a hard corner and create something different,”
That's my mistake.
I went back and read the actual opinion, and while I'm disappointed that training an LLM is fair-use transformative, I'm hopeful about a trial on the subject of the pirated copies. But I'm also worried that the argument seems like it might succeed if such training is "one-shot" without the central library or repository of intermediate copies. And that doesn't seem like a good outcome. But maybe my pessimism here is also misplaced.
It's like fan fiction: sneaking into theatre to watch a movie without paying for admission is illegal, but writing fan fiction about the movie and publishing it on AO3 is legal.
Of course they did, same with almost every other bit of training material that isn't synthetic (and still indirectly created with illegally obtained training data)
Title is misleading. The ruling said training on books is fair use. What got them in trouble was grabbing the books from LibGen instead of just buying them, which is a pretty dumb way to lose $1.5B. If I torrented half a million books I'd be getting a lot more than a $3k-per-book settlement.
We went through this with Google. Scanning books is legal as long as you then immediately destroy them. Then since training with material you own is fair use they’re good to go.
Like when people bring this up as if it's somehow just like acceptable.
It's not at all. That's utter bullshit. The people that run the courts have been bought out. They have no idea what the far-reaching consequences of this is.
Good! Information wants to be free, not locked up in some ivory tower. This is a great time upon us, when academics and ivy league elites can no longer gate keep knowledge and hoard it for their ego. Knowledge should benefit humanity as broadly as possible, not just the rich and their academic ilk.
Haha. I appreciate the intent behind this. HN will hate and downvote it of course, but we need constant reminders that we are emotional, take sides just like everyone else, and selectively get outraged about things.
It's not the information itself that get sold, but the specific composition of information arranged as a book. Work went into it and people who do it sell that rightfully.
Why couldn’t they pay for the book to get that knowledge then?
Or do you believe, all books should be free, authors shouldn’t be compensated ever? Why should we compensate programmers or any knowledge worker than if the fruits of their labor should thusly be freely distributed?
This. It's funny how supposed hackers and freethinkers, most of whom likely pirated something multiple times in their lives, suddenly support copyright.
I always supported copyright. Your accusation of hypocrisy is misplaced, or at the very least not precise enough because you're not aiming it at a specific person.
And I presume the Anthropic CEO will be indicted on 13 felony counts under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and for wire fraud. Like Aaron Swartz, right?
Right?
N.B. JSTOR explicitly settled with Swartz, suffered no financial harm, and begged the federal government to drop the case. The government refused and prosecuted Swartz anyway. Anthropic settled for $1.5 billion primarily because of the theft and storage of the files, but this was somehow a Civil issue...
No, the cases are different. Swartz circumvented network restrictions to obtain academic papers. Anthropic obtained pirated copies of books from sources that willingly distributed them.
It’s the active circumvention that allowed Schwartz to be charged federally. Anthropic didn’t violate the CFAA, only civil copyright.
I can understand how you would be so angry given your comprehension of the world is so… limited.
To me it sounds like your comprehension of the world is the one that is limited?
Instead of having any underlying values or beliefs about fairness from first principles, you'd rather autistically defer to the bizarre overlapping and bureaucratic rule-making nuances of a flawed, regularly-abused legal system?
the cfaa is extremely broad, but it doesn't cover downloading books from libgen and the like. there is no alleged unauthorized system access (in this case).
Aaron broke into a network closet and actively circumvented MAC address bans. The comparison isn't meaningful. Anthropic downloaded theirs from libgen:
> Similar to the claims in Bartz, the plaintiffs allege that Anthropic illegally downloaded, reproduced and distributed their copyrighted books from “shadow libraries” like LibGen and PiLiMi, and that Anthropic broke the law by downloading and storing the pirated files in a central library.
Why isn't the comparison meaningful? Aaron broke the law and circumvented protections, Anthropic broke the law and circumvented protections. Regardless of if Aaron broke into a network closet or anthropic broke DRM, anthropic took explicit action to receive knowingly stolen goods.
Why the downvote? Anthropic and OpenAI leadership are thieves and profiting off things they don’t own.
Aaron was doing it for the betterment of humanity, there wasn’t a profit motive involved there.
It seems like you believe it was wrong for Swartz to have been prosecuted. It doesn't seem like it would serve justice to prosecute other people in the same malicious way. Doing the wrong thing now just because a wrong thing happened in the past is not how a just society operates.
The difference here is that you have an individual with no profit motive being hounded by the government, vs a corporation with a profit motive and evidence of a continued pattern being let off with a slap on the wrist. To me that is not a just society.
There is also a "profit motive makes it wrong" idea permeating at least parts of the culture, which is equally suspect. We should apply standards consistently and judge the ethics by the amount of harm that was caused.
It's not equally suspect. Profit seeking behavior, left unchecked, yields problematic outcomes rather quickly. Unmonetized actions don't seem to have this tendency. Like, nobody volunteers to distribute contaminated food, but people will do so quite readily in service to their bottom line. Until we can find a way to bias our economic outputs away from things that harm and towards things that help, guilty until proven innocent is the right heuristic for profit seekers.
> Like, nobody volunteers to distribute contaminated food, but people will do so quite readily in service to their bottom line.
Who? Name names. You are making a bold, broad claim. Who are these specific people against whom you have specific evidence of their willingness to “distribute contaminated food … quite readily in service to their bottom line”?
> FDA’s leading hypothesis remains that this was likely an act of economically motivated adulteration.
Are you actually going to argue that people don't do things that are unsafe for others when money is on the line? We're living in an ocean of evidence that it happens.
It's a thing, it's called food fraud. Happens commonly these days with various spices, which are often cut with metals to increase their weight. Sometimes those metals are heavy metals, which are obviously bad for you.
Historically this happened to basically all food. Meat was sold rotten, meat was pumped with water for volume, people lied about what meat they were selling, meat was glued together with other meat to create reconstituted cuts that were sold as whole, and on and on. We had exposes, The Jungle, and now that basically doesn't exist because of the FDA.
But, in countries without an FDA equivalent, you can imagine that food fraud runs wild. It ran wild in the US, too, and I think it's fair to say that the only thing limiting it isn't morals, it's the FDA and regulatory framework we've built.
It is not profit motive but public choice economics, from which we see that state actors and agencies act in their own interest. The difference is a defenseless individual being bullied by an overly zealous official who thought she had something to gain by beating up a nerd versus an organization picking on someone their own size.
I actually think we should maximally punish people for breaking the law if the law exists. And remove or edit the law if it no longer serves the people. The way we go about this stuff is that we let people break laws until it serves some purpose. Instead we should remove or edit the laws.
Otherwise we're creating a system where it is unfair for some people.
Anthropic has ample resources to fight this law if it is unjust. They should get vigorous, to-the-letter enforcement of the law to stress-test it for people who don't have the same level of resources.
Selective application of the law in favor of the rich and powerful is a perversion of justice, even if it does sometimes result in more just outcomes in individual cases.
In casual conversation in America English, it a derogaty term used to mean "poor and lacking in quality of life, freedom, and/or democratic governance."
FWIW, the Aaron Swartz thing happened because an egomaniacal politician thought it would bolster her career. It was a fluke (her office was only involved by coincidence) with disastrous consequences.
We shouldn't be using that as precedent; in fact, it should be the opposite.
No, we should absolutely use it to attack these anti-human technologists. The precedent has been set and we can fight back against these extremely anti-democratic death cults using the tried and true method of state sanctioned lawfare.
Three prosecutors and MIT leadership were responsible for the charges. Most US Attorney's are scummy attack dogs because their work requires it, so I would blame MIT for wanting to make an example of him instead of handling it like a disciplinary matter and a teachable moment.
I've been saying the same thing, Aaron Swartz arguably contributed more meaningful things long before AI, and was basically forced to make one of the worst decisions a person can make (at least in my opinion).
If you're unaware of who he was, or what happened to him:
* He was one of 12 others who helped to spec out RSS' standard (when he was 14 years old).
* He is widely considered a co-founder of reddit, after merging with reddit, he rewrote the majority of its codebase from Lisp to Python.
* He was one of the reasons Reddit protested SOPA back in the day (the same day that good 'old Kim Dotcom was raided and arrested by the US, the irony of which being that they swore up and down that they needed SOPA in order to do what they did to Kim Dotcom).
* I didn't know this before: he also developed the markdown publishing format with John Gruber.
What happened to him?
He was charged with felonies for stealing PDFs for publicly funded research papers, he was tried as if he hacked these systems. He took his own life as a result of them throwing decades of prison time at him for what's hardly a serious hacking offense (seriously, Kevin Mitnick was way worse). Kevin Mitnick served five years, they were looking to throw up to 35 years at him, and a minimum sentence of seven years if he went to trial.
It is abhorrent to me that we have people doing more malicious hacks that get no repercussions. Someone at OpenAI / Anthropic should be 100% liable for criminal charges of what their AI models do. Need I remind everyone, that these models can run way faster than what we common folk can see, the speed at which they run these models internally can go so quickly that by the time the model is discovered to have hacked someone, it could very well be too late. Just try the "fast" feature of Claude Code, now imagine Claude launching thousands of sub-agents at top speed internally, the capacity for unprecedented destruction is the most concerning thing to me, I say that as someone who uses Claude every week.
Because it's true, and he tried when he wasn't being prosecuted. The point has that some people are unfortunately prone to chronic suicidal episodes. It doesn't make sense to blame some external factor in cases like these.
If he was cut off in traffic and then went home and committed suicide, would you say that the driver that cut him off was responsible for his suicide. You might say that's because no normal person would commit suicide over that act, but no normal person would commit suicide when offered a 6 month house arrest.
And if you were going to commit suicide because of a long prison sentence you would probably do it after you were found guilty, like the guy who drank poison right as he was found guilty of something that would put him in jail for most of the rest of his life
That’s a disingenuous presentation of why you added it. Stated clearly, you added it to discredit him, the severity of the contribution that the charges played in harm to him, up to and including contributing to his suicide and to shift the burden from the government and its use of selective coercion to what others are arguing is a victim.
The government was or should have been aware of his mental health history and could have tailored the punishment accordingly so as to not risk pushing him over the edge. The constitution protects against cruel and unusual punishment which includes punishment in excess of the underlying crime, no one would argue his crime warrants death but by proceeding with the threat of excessive punishment on a person know to have suicidal tendencies the government is culpable in the consequences.
To use your example, the government knew he had a history of saying he would drink poison and said “here’s our finest selection of artisanal poisons, we will leave them right here next to your bed”.
The consequences of 6 months house arrest also came with having a felony record which would permanently affect his life making it harder to get a job and a broad set of consequences. And most people wouldn’t think breaking into a broom closet would have resulted in that. I had friends break into the computer lab, use the teachers password to copy games off school computers and get caught: should they face federal felony charges? Definitely not.
> He was charged with felonies for stealing PDFs for publicly funded research papers, he was tried as if he hacked these systems.
The Aaron Swartz case is important to know about and has catalyzed some good discussions about CFAA reform, but that specific case is a lot more complicated than your summary.
Before I begin: I agree that the punishment was too significant for the crime. I completely agree on that count. Discussing the facts of the case draws a lot of angry downvotes, so to be clear: I'm not saying he deserved any of these sentences nor that the laws are written well. I'm trying to explain the facts.
The PDFs were open to downloads on the MIT network. Straightforward downloading of the PDFs wouldn't have been a CFAA violation. The case became complicated because he started circumventing restrictions on the downloads. This escalated to breaking into a wiring closet and hiding a laptop in the closed-off infrastructure. Once someone breaks into physical infrastructure to circumvent access restrictions, it gets really hard to argue that they weren't doing a form of unauthorized access.
> He took his own life as a result of them throwing decades of prison time at him for what's hardly a serious hacking offense (seriously, Kevin Mitnick was way worse). Kevin Mitnick served five years, they were looking to throw up to 35 years at him, and a minimum sentence of seven years if he went to trial.
This is another part of the story that gets confused. Kevin Mitnick took a 5 year plea deal. The Swartz case plea deal was 6 months. The maximum sentencing numbers are repeated because they're shocking, but maximum sentencing was never on the table due to the low severity.
The plea deal (the correct comparison to Kevin Mitnick's case) would have been 6 months, not 35+ years.
even back then, having 1 day in prison can forever impact your employment aspects. Perhaps the rising trend of internet influencer could have gotten around it, but it's less about the sentence and more about the federal government choosing to prosecute a young man over a situation both parties already settled.
Meanwhile, Claude does the same thing and it is deemed "progress" when the federal government profits from it.
One thing to note is that Aaron was, at the time, increasingly working in traditional politics, through his activist group Demand Progress[1] and his work with up-and-coming progressive politicians. I think he had come to the conclusion -- rather presciently -- that working in mainstream politics was the most effective thing he could do. Any criminal sentence would have severely hampered that work. I heard that played on his mind a lot.
There's a what-if story here: one of the people Aaron worked most closely with in this part of his life was a young Ben Wikler[2]. They shared a lot of views about how things should change, and how to change them. Watching Ben's career since then, I can't help but feel that Aaron would have followed a similar path. By 2025, Ben was senior enough in the Democratic Party to be a competitive candidate for Chair of the DNC.
I often wonder whether Carmen Ortiz[3], the U.S. Attorney whose office prosecuted the case, or any of the rest of that generation, realise what they did to the Democratic Party's future chances by unjustly targeting one of its most promising figures.
Who were the prosecutors and lawyers involved in the Aaron Swartz case? Where are the pitchforks for them? You can't just hide behind "The Government".
Apparently, at least some of the people involved were Carmen Ortiz and Stephen Heymann. While pitchforks did come, they were in no way punished directly for this case and were allowed to ride off into the sunset at the minor cost of their political careers.
by the way, a year after swartz worked on RSS (so when he was 15) he joined the creative commons foundation and helped create the technical architecture for it. what a guy
> He was charged with felonies for stealing PDFs for publicly funded research papers, he was tried as if he hacked these systems. He took his own life as a result of them throwing decades of prison time at him for what's hardly a serious hacking offense (seriously, Kevin Mitnick was way worse).
None of the federal charges really had anything to do with copying the files [1].
> Kevin Mitnick served five years, they were looking to throw up to 35 years at him, and a minimum sentence of seven years if he went to trial.
You are comparing the ridiculous DOJ press release number [2] for Swartz to Mitnick's actual sentence. You should compare like to like, so should be comparing 35 years for Swartz to the ridiculous DOJ press release number for Mitnick which was 200 years.
>He was charged with felonies for stealing PDFs for publicly funded research papers, he was tried as if he hacked these systems.
He did hack these systems and MIT's network. They had video of him in the MIT wiring closet and a mountain of circumstantial evidence. I'm not saying it wasn't pursued aggressively out of political motivations, which seems supported if you dig enough, but the facts of the case were about more than PDFs.
Do you have a citation for the claim that Schwartz was only copying "publicly funded research papers"? My understanding is that he was trying to pull all of JSTOR, which would be copyrighted papers going back to all kinds of funding models from many countries, not just US public-funded research.
Don't get me wrong, as a researcher myself most of us seem him (and his successors in piracy) as heroes that make our work a lot easier by making everything so easily accessible, usually even more convenient than our own institutional libraries. But your claim sounds like inaccurate myth-building.
JSTOR is a major repository of twentieth-century humanities publications. When these come from the US, they are usually privately funded research. HN is dominated by a STEM crowd that tends to think only about that scholarship, which is often publicly funded, but in a discussion like this one needs a good familiarity with what JSTOR is and what it contains.
Eh, I assume the humanities are a tiny portion of the funding for academia. Their equipment is what, coloured pencils and expensive tea? Hardly anything compared to a large hadron collider.
I was referring to the comment about private vs public funding. Yes, the only relevant fact is about the morality of hiding knowledge behind exorbitant pay walls. Academics submit papers freely, and sometimes pay for the privilege, peer reviewers work for free, and then the rent seekers charge everybody to read it. It's immoral. I agree.
> He is widely considered a co-founder of reddit, after merging with reddit, he rewrote the majority of its codebase from Lisp to Python.
Internally, this was not the case in 2013. u/kn0thing and u/spez were considered the founders, their retired jerseys hung on the wall, and no one ever mentioned Aaron Swartz.
The distinction (besides Anthropic being too big to be thrown in jail) is that Aaron Schwartz was intentionally pirating research papers with intent to redistribute, and was publicly attacking copyright laws.
Anthropic training their model outside of public sight without intent to redistribute, and had a large paper trail that expressed they believed they were acting within fair use.
Are you saying Aaron Swartz should have just left a similar paper trail documenting that he believed to do the right thing in the interest of society? I don't believe this would have saved him from the wrath of the copyright industry.
The Aaron Swartz case is not an analog of these claims.
The Anthropic class action was already settled. It's what they mention in the opening of the article. Anthropic got in trouble for downloading the books (pirating) but it was determined to be fair use to use the content for training.
Aaron Swartz was not charged with piracy or downloading PDFs, even though that's how the story has been told. The charges were related to him breaking into a private wiring closet, hiding a laptop, and circumventing access controls on a system.
The Aaron Swartz charges were ridiculous. I'm not disputing that. However, there isn't an equivalent charge in this Anthropic case. Even if you or I get caught downloading pirated PDFs of eBooks from a torrent, the CFAA would not apply.
The main class action suit was already decided. The Stanford professors in this story opted out of the class action and are trying to get higher individual settlements with their own lawyers.
One of the issues a lot of people have is that if Aaron had formed an LLC and hired someone to connect the laptop for him, jailtime would never have been under the table and he wouldn't necessarily be directly liable for any large fines he couldn't pay.
There is a general sentiment that it is wrong for licensed organizations of people to get away with crimes ranging from these to supporting literal child labor, when an unlicensed group or individual faces decades in prison for the same offenses.
And there is another sentiment that Swartz would not have had to do what he did in the first place if copyright and the DMCA hadn't been erected only to be weaponized and discriminately applied,
> if Aaron had formed an LLC and hired someone to connect the laptop for him, jailtime would never have been under the table
Yes, it would. Ortiz was pushing a novel interpretation of the CFAA under which ToS violations constituted criminal access. It has no legal precedent but was in vogue at the time. (After Swartz, it fell completely out of favor.)
Aaron Swartz ran so the labs could sprint. Markdown is ginormous. Every answer on Stack Overflow is licensed under Creative Commons 2.0. 20 years of human exchange on Reddit. And finally, the knowledge he decided should be free for all mankind can be sold back to us, through a meter, by the token.
If he were still here, he would be 40 in only a couple of weeks.
Aaron Swartz should not have been prosecuted. Full stop. His case should not (and I am fairly certain will not) be seen as legal precedent for employees at Anthropic. Each time I have read the headline for this story today on HN I clicked below the up arrow wishing that there was a way to downvote stories. Intellectual property bullies are not only aggressively boring, their clamor adds nothing constructive to society: it is purely parasitic and uninteresting discourse.
Thank you for saying this. I am getting tired of current SV speed running culture that actually like the means justify the end. And anyone that says “but ai will save so many lives every day delay is a genocide” spare me, you can’t prove that is true and you don’t get to violate established moral and legal principles in service of some vague and impossible to quantify future utopia.
And to be clear, Aaron should not have been charged under the circumstances.
Thank you for not forgetting about him. I bring up this insane and tragic persecution and prosecutorial injustice and hypocrisy whenever I can.
I don't understand how people have just moved past all these various obvious flaws in the foundations of our society. It's like finding a bug and saying "we don't need to patch it" and then building on top of it, all while knowing it exists. We all know that something is fundamentally wrong.
Everyone in this thread arguing the legalese of what Aaron did vs what Anthropic did is missing the damn point.
Yes, the exact crimes are not the same.
Aaron was a vulnerable individual and a very easy target for an overzealous prosecutor. Anthropic is a large company with the money and resources to shield any individual working there from meaningful punishment. No one at anthropic is facing jail time for crimes that should carry a sentence. The crimes are similar and involve theft of copyrighted resources. Aaron’s point with JSTOR is that all that research had already been paid for by American taxpayers. JSTOR was just gatekeeping for profit.
The message from Alsup is clear: if you have money, pay the fine and you can keep doing what you like. If you’re a single person without that, you will be caught and maliciously prosecuted.
Does copyright over knowledge-based works really have any legitimate position in today's society? We're entering a new age of how information is created, used, and distributed.
> [The Congress shall have Power] To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.
We've entered many new ages of how information is created, used, and distributed over the last 250 years. There's nothing special enough about this new era which justifies throwing out the old ideas of moral and economic rights of an author.
You're the one that brought morality into the conversation. If you don't think there's anything unique about what we've experienced in the last few years, I don't know what to tell you.
I can understand why someone opposed to copyright may be ignorant of the details, but you should know that you were the one who implicitly brought up "moral rights", which is a legal term associated with copyright. Quoting the Berne Convention, Article 6bis:
"Independent of the author's economic rights, and even after the transfer of the said rights, the author shall have the right to claim authorship of the work and to object to any distortion, modification of, or other derogatory action in relation to the said work, which would be prejudicial to the author's honor or reputation."
As the old saying goes, "You are unique, just like everyone else." Which is why I never said the current time has nothing unique, but rather "There's nothing special enough".
The player piano roll transformed copyright, with White-Smith Music Publishing Company v. Apollo Company leading to the Copyright Act of 1909.
The Linotype machine, microfilm, the photocopier, the cassette tape, the floppy disk, the internet, BitTorrent - every single one of these challenged existing ideas of copyright.
Legitimate as in value-preserving or economically? Probably not. Legitimate as in protecting human authors and artists? I think yeah.
We can argue about whether AI is a net-good for society and if the ends justify the means, but I think it's clear that a lot of people who worked very hard are getting fucked over. Is that okay? Are we really fine with piloting the idea "if you're rich enough you can do anything"?
Because, the reality is that if you or I did this, as many have done before, we would be getting sued to oblivion. Assuming we don't straight-up go to jail. But then AI superscalers do the same thing, on the order of 10,000, and somehow nobody goes to jail. Is that really the kind of message we want to send?
They should get Opus or one of the latest models to be the morality judge of what goes into training.
I had an issue recently where I asked claude code to log into a developer user on Chrome on my local host for a system which is fully local and part of the code base the agent was developing and it refused to do it, like flat out refused, I did it on multiple sessions and I could not get Claude to budge on entering the credentials - it required me to manually sign in.
Would be amazing if they used that same level of training for their intake exercises.
This is such an amazing take... if "training" an LLM with a book is fine, if you rewrite the book with slightly different wording... are you plagiarizing it? if you are then every application of AI over trained data of that trained data is plagiarizing?
Say you have this Math book and you rewrite it from third to first person and then replace all the sine examples with cosine and modify the exercises to have different numbers... is it stealing? you can buy 1 book, "train on it" and then generate your "personal original approved copy"
I've pirated several books, movies, games, and music albums because there was literally no way to give someone my money for them. I can't imagine trying to acquire things legitimately, at scale.
Neural network is a method of compression. Lossy compression. What the AI companies want to push constantly is misconception:
This is not algorithm
And
They think
They are juggling between a personification and de-personification of their models according to what they need at the moment. So when you're hacking using fable, fable says you hacked.
When anthropic wants to gain money they say "our model hacked and we do not know why (damn it's so good)"
When using publications, "they have been used for learning" (not algorithmic compression)
That professor saying that the use of work he already produced amounts to "slave labor"... copyright infringement is substantially different than slavery.
You could say minimum wage at $7.25 but very few people actually make that (1%).
Or maybe an entry level aid in an eldery home making $11/hr and cleaning the anus and genitals of old men that are hitting on them. Would you agree $11/hr is poor remuneration for that kind of job? Or would you argue there is no one poorly remunerated?
McDonald's workers are certainly closer to being slaves than any professor at Stanford. That's one reason California established a minimum $20/hr for foodservice work. Even when the work is largely a matter of tending machines rather than the application of hard-won culinary skills, it's still hot, dangerous, dirty, and demanding.
> Slavery is not being poorly compensated or coerced into work.
It kind of is though :/
Like I get what you're saying, minimum wage workers have an autonomy that slaves would not have. But in practice that autonomy is often not meaningful in any real way.
I don't know. I just think that "You're a hair above being a slave so it doesn't count as slavery" is probably not a hill worth dying on
Jane Doe making $14/hr at McDonald’s is absolutely a wage slave. It is different than historical chattel slavery, but no less slavery, albeit dressed up to look less offensive on the surface.
Someone who makes this statement this really want us to equate it with racist chattel slavery - the most heinous form of worker exploitation in modern memory. "Oh, I just meant: {the most common type of work in human history}" as a retreat is not very compelling.
It was Carlyle who, in his seminal Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question, argued that slavery is a fundamental human relationship, and as such you can't ban slavery, but can only ban the word.
Whether it was through serfdom, indentured servitute, state labor obligations, patriarchal labor obligations, or outright slavery - coerced human labor was a constant norm.
In Britain, quitting a job was criminal until 1875!
The idea that work is done almost exclusively through voluntary labor is a modern (post-WW2) reality, and even then mostly exclusive to Western, capitalist nations. Even in modern, non-capitalist society (Soviet Union, Maoist China) work was largely obligatory and assigned to you.
Of course, Marx would point out that all labor is obligatory if you need to work to eat. But I think he would even take for granted the ability for everyone to accept or reject what specific work they wanted to do.
I don’t think that’s true, words just tend to diminish in strength over time towards a muddy middle. Look at how basically anything gets labeled “fascist” these days.
For an older example consider “awesome” (literally: inspiring awe)
Well, given that copyright infringement doesn't require any labor on the part of the person who created the work, it seems to be an inappropriate use of the phrase in this case.
One of the interesting things about copyright infringement is that if you weren't told it was happening, you'd never know.
Actually it's even worse than that. If you have to work for money, instead of money working for you, then you're money's slave.
Buying back your freedom has a specific price tag, in our economy. (Most people don't do the math though, because it is unpleasant. I would recommend doing the math.)
Not talking about that professor in particulier, but it seems like there is a significant amount of "slave labor" happening in academia, by professors, that goes further than simple copyright infringement.
I am talking about professors taking the work of their students as their own, unpaid of course, and the students can't say much because their future depends on it. So before calling simple copyright infringement "slave labor", they should look at their own community. At least the professors whose work is illegally copied are not forced to do it by the ones taking it.
FWIW he's primarily known as a writer of fiction and memoir, not as a professor. Interestingly, half of the other professors named are fiction writers.
That is an excellent way of looking at things - if a distillation attack against a model is bad, so should be a distillation attack against mankind. I'd argue that this suggests the former should be legal, rather than the latter becoming illegal.
Exactly. Either information flows freely, or everyone pays every bit of it. It’s clear which one is more beneficial to society. Barring distillation is an extraction of social wealth.
I'm willing to bet the vast majority of students and professors at Stanford have consulted an "illegally obtained" textbook at some point. Either directly from Anna or second hand.
After a 1.5 billion settlement, the authors are saying it's not enough.
The judge had an interesting summary of AI:
"He compared AI training to how humans can read, internalize and remember a book’s themes and style. “Like any reader aspiring to be a writer, Anthropic’s LLMs trained upon works not to race ahead and replicate or supplant them — but to turn a hard corner and create something different,” he wrote."
This violates the RICO statute; the entire organization was aware of and relied on the widespread and organized violation of copyright laws as the basis of their entire business. It is a criminal organization, should be seized, and everyone in the chain of command that was aware of or executed on this plan should be tried criminally.
I do not think training an AI model is Fair Use, because LLM "training" is being used as a metaphor for building a matrix with a computer. Only people and animals train and learn; computers run statistical problems over input, which in this case was illegal input acquired by humans.
But it does not matter whether training LLMs is Fair Use, "Fair Use" is a strange and arbitrary legal term that can be expanded to include AI if we wish. This was organized crime whether or not LLM training on copyrighted materials is fair use. It was organized crime whether or not they planned to use them for AI at all.
AI is irrelevant. They could have trained it on GPL'd or MIT code (as long as they then distributed according to the terms of the licenses), and works in the public domain. They could have gotten what they were doing explicitly declared to be fair use by the Library of Congress, and then purchased the materials, like they are belatedly doing now. It wasn't necessary to violate copyright law to prove the technology. They could have proved the technology, then asked for copyright law to be clarified, and licensed huge volumes of works from the very few publishers we have left. Becoming a criminal organization was an explicit choice they made, and they discussed its illegality, and even the risk that it would be discussed on HN, which might inspire prosecution.
The reason they are not being prosecuted is because the rich are beyond the law; prosecutors will not prosecute them. The RICO statute is clear, and explicitly mentions copyright violation.
We can sentence the executives harshly, but go easy on the lower level people, because they are intelligent and valuable to advance the technology. The executives aren't necessary for anything. They're currently running finance scams that are extremely dangerous for the economy. They belong in prison to protect the public.
This is an option that people (real people, with names) have, and are not taking. When they say that they care about law and order, and are worried about the behavior of these companies, they are lying. Trump could literally nationalize them for what they've done. They're vulnerable to any state's attorney who has any author in their state whose book was downloaded. Libgen/Annas-archive would have been the most important honeypot in history.
There's a certain element of irony to all of this, what, with it being Stanford, the home of "forgiveness is easier to get than permission" and anti-regulation sentiment in the tech industry.
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[ 0.56 ms ] story [ 77.7 ms ] threadAnthropic trained on illegally acquired Stanford professors' books
The article does not say the training was illegal (although does discuss the professors push for a licensing model).
The noteworthy thing here, IMO, is the judge seems to have explicitly stated that using legally-acquired works to train AI models falls under fair use.
What the actual ruling found was that the professors should have been paid some tens of dollars for 1 copy of their book.
(Whether you agree with it or not is another matter)
> While blocking the piracy of work to train AI
when I read the quote:
> “Like any reader aspiring to be a writer, Anthropic’s LLMs trained upon works not to race ahead and replicate or supplant them — but to turn a hard corner and create something different,”
That's my mistake.
I went back and read the actual opinion, and while I'm disappointed that training an LLM is fair-use transformative, I'm hopeful about a trial on the subject of the pirated copies. But I'm also worried that the argument seems like it might succeed if such training is "one-shot" without the central library or repository of intermediate copies. And that doesn't seem like a good outcome. But maybe my pessimism here is also misplaced.
But the car I bought with the money was totally legal.
They've since bought vast numbers of second hand books and scanned those for training, which appears be legal.
Interesting phrasing from you, Simon. Is there any legal theory under which it should be illegal?
Like when people bring this up as if it's somehow just like acceptable.
It's not at all. That's utter bullshit. The people that run the courts have been bought out. They have no idea what the far-reaching consequences of this is.
Or do you believe, all books should be free, authors shouldn’t be compensated ever? Why should we compensate programmers or any knowledge worker than if the fruits of their labor should thusly be freely distributed?
Very soon, all information will be free!
Supposedly the trillion dollar company isn’t in the set of “rich” here, but professors are.
Right?
N.B. JSTOR explicitly settled with Swartz, suffered no financial harm, and begged the federal government to drop the case. The government refused and prosecuted Swartz anyway. Anthropic settled for $1.5 billion primarily because of the theft and storage of the files, but this was somehow a Civil issue...
It’s the active circumvention that allowed Schwartz to be charged federally. Anthropic didn’t violate the CFAA, only civil copyright.
I can understand how you would be so angry given your comprehension of the world is so… limited.
Instead of having any underlying values or beliefs about fairness from first principles, you'd rather autistically defer to the bizarre overlapping and bureaucratic rule-making nuances of a flawed, regularly-abused legal system?
> Similar to the claims in Bartz, the plaintiffs allege that Anthropic illegally downloaded, reproduced and distributed their copyrighted books from “shadow libraries” like LibGen and PiLiMi, and that Anthropic broke the law by downloading and storing the pirated files in a central library.
Say you have a network. You want to keep someone out of it. The tool for that is the CFAA.
If you have a book, and you want to stop someone from reproducing it, the tool for that is copyright.
They cover different domains. If you're not breaking into a network, you're unlikely to be charged under the CFAA.
But the rich buy “justice”. Us plebes are meant to “face justice”.
Who? Name names. You are making a bold, broad claim. Who are these specific people against whom you have specific evidence of their willingness to “distribute contaminated food … quite readily in service to their bottom line”?
A quote from that page:
> FDA’s leading hypothesis remains that this was likely an act of economically motivated adulteration.
Are you actually going to argue that people don't do things that are unsafe for others when money is on the line? We're living in an ocean of evidence that it happens.
Historically this happened to basically all food. Meat was sold rotten, meat was pumped with water for volume, people lied about what meat they were selling, meat was glued together with other meat to create reconstituted cuts that were sold as whole, and on and on. We had exposes, The Jungle, and now that basically doesn't exist because of the FDA.
But, in countries without an FDA equivalent, you can imagine that food fraud runs wild. It ran wild in the US, too, and I think it's fair to say that the only thing limiting it isn't morals, it's the FDA and regulatory framework we've built.
Otherwise we're creating a system where it is unfair for some people.
Selective application of the law in favor of the rich and powerful is a perversion of justice, even if it does sometimes result in more just outcomes in individual cases.
In casual conversation in America English, it a derogaty term used to mean "poor and lacking in quality of life, freedom, and/or democratic governance."
We shouldn't be using that as precedent; in fact, it should be the opposite.
If you're unaware of who he was, or what happened to him:
* He was one of 12 others who helped to spec out RSS' standard (when he was 14 years old).
* He is widely considered a co-founder of reddit, after merging with reddit, he rewrote the majority of its codebase from Lisp to Python.
* He was one of the reasons Reddit protested SOPA back in the day (the same day that good 'old Kim Dotcom was raided and arrested by the US, the irony of which being that they swore up and down that they needed SOPA in order to do what they did to Kim Dotcom).
* I didn't know this before: he also developed the markdown publishing format with John Gruber.
What happened to him?
He was charged with felonies for stealing PDFs for publicly funded research papers, he was tried as if he hacked these systems. He took his own life as a result of them throwing decades of prison time at him for what's hardly a serious hacking offense (seriously, Kevin Mitnick was way worse). Kevin Mitnick served five years, they were looking to throw up to 35 years at him, and a minimum sentence of seven years if he went to trial.
It is abhorrent to me that we have people doing more malicious hacks that get no repercussions. Someone at OpenAI / Anthropic should be 100% liable for criminal charges of what their AI models do. Need I remind everyone, that these models can run way faster than what we common folk can see, the speed at which they run these models internally can go so quickly that by the time the model is discovered to have hacked someone, it could very well be too late. Just try the "fast" feature of Claude Code, now imagine Claude launching thousands of sub-agents at top speed internally, the capacity for unprecedented destruction is the most concerning thing to me, I say that as someone who uses Claude every week.
If he was cut off in traffic and then went home and committed suicide, would you say that the driver that cut him off was responsible for his suicide. You might say that's because no normal person would commit suicide over that act, but no normal person would commit suicide when offered a 6 month house arrest.
And if you were going to commit suicide because of a long prison sentence you would probably do it after you were found guilty, like the guy who drank poison right as he was found guilty of something that would put him in jail for most of the rest of his life
The government was or should have been aware of his mental health history and could have tailored the punishment accordingly so as to not risk pushing him over the edge. The constitution protects against cruel and unusual punishment which includes punishment in excess of the underlying crime, no one would argue his crime warrants death but by proceeding with the threat of excessive punishment on a person know to have suicidal tendencies the government is culpable in the consequences.
To use your example, the government knew he had a history of saying he would drink poison and said “here’s our finest selection of artisanal poisons, we will leave them right here next to your bed”.
The consequences of 6 months house arrest also came with having a felony record which would permanently affect his life making it harder to get a job and a broad set of consequences. And most people wouldn’t think breaking into a broom closet would have resulted in that. I had friends break into the computer lab, use the teachers password to copy games off school computers and get caught: should they face federal felony charges? Definitely not.
The Aaron Swartz case is important to know about and has catalyzed some good discussions about CFAA reform, but that specific case is a lot more complicated than your summary.
Before I begin: I agree that the punishment was too significant for the crime. I completely agree on that count. Discussing the facts of the case draws a lot of angry downvotes, so to be clear: I'm not saying he deserved any of these sentences nor that the laws are written well. I'm trying to explain the facts.
The PDFs were open to downloads on the MIT network. Straightforward downloading of the PDFs wouldn't have been a CFAA violation. The case became complicated because he started circumventing restrictions on the downloads. This escalated to breaking into a wiring closet and hiding a laptop in the closed-off infrastructure. Once someone breaks into physical infrastructure to circumvent access restrictions, it gets really hard to argue that they weren't doing a form of unauthorized access.
> He took his own life as a result of them throwing decades of prison time at him for what's hardly a serious hacking offense (seriously, Kevin Mitnick was way worse). Kevin Mitnick served five years, they were looking to throw up to 35 years at him, and a minimum sentence of seven years if he went to trial.
This is another part of the story that gets confused. Kevin Mitnick took a 5 year plea deal. The Swartz case plea deal was 6 months. The maximum sentencing numbers are repeated because they're shocking, but maximum sentencing was never on the table due to the low severity.
The plea deal (the correct comparison to Kevin Mitnick's case) would have been 6 months, not 35+ years.
ffs
Meanwhile, Claude does the same thing and it is deemed "progress" when the federal government profits from it.
There's a what-if story here: one of the people Aaron worked most closely with in this part of his life was a young Ben Wikler[2]. They shared a lot of views about how things should change, and how to change them. Watching Ben's career since then, I can't help but feel that Aaron would have followed a similar path. By 2025, Ben was senior enough in the Democratic Party to be a competitive candidate for Chair of the DNC.
I often wonder whether Carmen Ortiz[3], the U.S. Attorney whose office prosecuted the case, or any of the rest of that generation, realise what they did to the Democratic Party's future chances by unjustly targeting one of its most promising figures.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demand_Progress
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Wikler
[3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carmen_Ortiz
If only he continued the work, he would be POTUS someday.
None of the federal charges really had anything to do with copying the files [1].
> Kevin Mitnick served five years, they were looking to throw up to 35 years at him, and a minimum sentence of seven years if he went to trial.
You are comparing the ridiculous DOJ press release number [2] for Swartz to Mitnick's actual sentence. You should compare like to like, so should be comparing 35 years for Swartz to the ridiculous DOJ press release number for Mitnick which was 200 years.
[1] https://volokh.com/2013/01/14/aaron-swartz-charges/
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20130211030902/https://www.popeh...
He did hack these systems and MIT's network. They had video of him in the MIT wiring closet and a mountain of circumstantial evidence. I'm not saying it wasn't pursued aggressively out of political motivations, which seems supported if you dig enough, but the facts of the case were about more than PDFs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Swartz
Don't get me wrong, as a researcher myself most of us seem him (and his successors in piracy) as heroes that make our work a lot easier by making everything so easily accessible, usually even more convenient than our own institutional libraries. But your claim sounds like inaccurate myth-building.
A lot (but yes, not all) of that research is publicly funded and then locked away behind corporate paywalls.
Internally, this was not the case in 2013. u/kn0thing and u/spez were considered the founders, their retired jerseys hung on the wall, and no one ever mentioned Aaron Swartz.
But yes, if the US government would want to appear at least partially "just", it would apply the same pressure here. Somehow that is very doubtful.
And again shame on reddit for being that spineless.
A case which never went to trial and tanked the prosecutor’s career resulting in no more prosecutions of its kind to date.
Let’s not hanker for a return to that.
Anthropic training their model outside of public sight without intent to redistribute, and had a large paper trail that expressed they believed they were acting within fair use.
And, you know, all of the intentional, physical, artfully-planned means by which he did so.
The Anthropic class action was already settled. It's what they mention in the opening of the article. Anthropic got in trouble for downloading the books (pirating) but it was determined to be fair use to use the content for training.
Aaron Swartz was not charged with piracy or downloading PDFs, even though that's how the story has been told. The charges were related to him breaking into a private wiring closet, hiding a laptop, and circumventing access controls on a system.
The Aaron Swartz charges were ridiculous. I'm not disputing that. However, there isn't an equivalent charge in this Anthropic case. Even if you or I get caught downloading pirated PDFs of eBooks from a torrent, the CFAA would not apply.
The main class action suit was already decided. The Stanford professors in this story opted out of the class action and are trying to get higher individual settlements with their own lawyers.
There is a general sentiment that it is wrong for licensed organizations of people to get away with crimes ranging from these to supporting literal child labor, when an unlicensed group or individual faces decades in prison for the same offenses.
And there is another sentiment that Swartz would not have had to do what he did in the first place if copyright and the DMCA hadn't been erected only to be weaponized and discriminately applied,
Yes, it would. Ortiz was pushing a novel interpretation of the CFAA under which ToS violations constituted criminal access. It has no legal precedent but was in vogue at the time. (After Swartz, it fell completely out of favor.)
Indeed: the prosecution of Aaron Swartz drove him to suicide, while Anthropic's CEO Dario Amodei is still alive.
If he were still here, he would be 40 in only a couple of weeks.
And to be clear, Aaron should not have been charged under the circumstances.
I don't understand how people have just moved past all these various obvious flaws in the foundations of our society. It's like finding a bug and saying "we don't need to patch it" and then building on top of it, all while knowing it exists. We all know that something is fundamentally wrong.
Yes, the exact crimes are not the same.
Aaron was a vulnerable individual and a very easy target for an overzealous prosecutor. Anthropic is a large company with the money and resources to shield any individual working there from meaningful punishment. No one at anthropic is facing jail time for crimes that should carry a sentence. The crimes are similar and involve theft of copyrighted resources. Aaron’s point with JSTOR is that all that research had already been paid for by American taxpayers. JSTOR was just gatekeeping for profit.
The message from Alsup is clear: if you have money, pay the fine and you can keep doing what you like. If you’re a single person without that, you will be caught and maliciously prosecuted.
... and the course of action of Carmen Ortiz', the responsible Attorney General, drove Aaron Swartz into suicide.
> [The Congress shall have Power] To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.
"Independent of the author's economic rights, and even after the transfer of the said rights, the author shall have the right to claim authorship of the work and to object to any distortion, modification of, or other derogatory action in relation to the said work, which would be prejudicial to the author's honor or reputation."
As the old saying goes, "You are unique, just like everyone else." Which is why I never said the current time has nothing unique, but rather "There's nothing special enough".
The player piano roll transformed copyright, with White-Smith Music Publishing Company v. Apollo Company leading to the Copyright Act of 1909.
The Linotype machine, microfilm, the photocopier, the cassette tape, the floppy disk, the internet, BitTorrent - every single one of these challenged existing ideas of copyright.
We can argue about whether AI is a net-good for society and if the ends justify the means, but I think it's clear that a lot of people who worked very hard are getting fucked over. Is that okay? Are we really fine with piloting the idea "if you're rich enough you can do anything"?
Because, the reality is that if you or I did this, as many have done before, we would be getting sued to oblivion. Assuming we don't straight-up go to jail. But then AI superscalers do the same thing, on the order of 10,000, and somehow nobody goes to jail. Is that really the kind of message we want to send?
I had an issue recently where I asked claude code to log into a developer user on Chrome on my local host for a system which is fully local and part of the code base the agent was developing and it refused to do it, like flat out refused, I did it on multiple sessions and I could not get Claude to budge on entering the credentials - it required me to manually sign in.
Would be amazing if they used that same level of training for their intake exercises.
So you come with this amazing idea regarding anything... how to build a chip, how to write software... and you write a book on how to...
Then a model eat it... spit it for free (they could get an advantage from being able to exercise that logic) and it's fair use...
Then... why torrent it, can't they sent someone to buy the book and scan it or buy it in pdf?
Say you have this Math book and you rewrite it from third to first person and then replace all the sine examples with cosine and modify the exercises to have different numbers... is it stealing? you can buy 1 book, "train on it" and then generate your "personal original approved copy"
When anthropic wants to gain money they say "our model hacked and we do not know why (damn it's so good)"
When using publications, "they have been used for learning" (not algorithmic compression)
Etc
As for the training being fair use, this is still disputed:
https://www.courthousenews.com/ai-training-of-copyrighted-ma...
> any coerced or poorly remunerated work. [1]
[1] https://www.dictionary.com/browse/slave-labor
And on the coercion side your definition includes jury duty.
Your definition doesn't work.
You could say minimum wage at $7.25 but very few people actually make that (1%).
Or maybe an entry level aid in an eldery home making $11/hr and cleaning the anus and genitals of old men that are hitting on them. Would you agree $11/hr is poor remuneration for that kind of job? Or would you argue there is no one poorly remunerated?
If you stop short of saying McDonalds workers are slaves, and that they are merely closer to being slaves, then you are agreeing with me.
Slavery is not being poorly compensated or coerced into work.
It kind of is though :/
Like I get what you're saying, minimum wage workers have an autonomy that slaves would not have. But in practice that autonomy is often not meaningful in any real way.
I don't know. I just think that "You're a hair above being a slave so it doesn't count as slavery" is probably not a hill worth dying on
It is a recognized idiom in many English dialects:
> If people work very hard for long hours for very little money, you can refer to it as slave labor.
* https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/slave-l...
> very hard work for which people are paid very little
* https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/slave-la...
> (informal) work that is very hard and very badly paid
* https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/americ...
See also "working in the salt mines" where people do not literally take sodium chloride out of the ground.
* https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/back+to+the+salt+mines
We call that "wage slavery" for a reason
Someone who makes this statement this really want us to equate it with racist chattel slavery - the most heinous form of worker exploitation in modern memory. "Oh, I just meant: {the most common type of work in human history}" as a retreat is not very compelling.
Surprised to see someone casually admit that the most common type of human labor is slave labor.
Whether it was through serfdom, indentured servitute, state labor obligations, patriarchal labor obligations, or outright slavery - coerced human labor was a constant norm.
In Britain, quitting a job was criminal until 1875!
The idea that work is done almost exclusively through voluntary labor is a modern (post-WW2) reality, and even then mostly exclusive to Western, capitalist nations. Even in modern, non-capitalist society (Soviet Union, Maoist China) work was largely obligatory and assigned to you.
Of course, Marx would point out that all labor is obligatory if you need to work to eat. But I think he would even take for granted the ability for everyone to accept or reject what specific work they wanted to do.
For an older example consider “awesome” (literally: inspiring awe)
In the linked example, I don't think the author in question meant to make light of slavery when comparing it to their victimhood.
One of the interesting things about copyright infringement is that if you weren't told it was happening, you'd never know.
Buying back your freedom has a specific price tag, in our economy. (Most people don't do the math though, because it is unpleasant. I would recommend doing the math.)
I am talking about professors taking the work of their students as their own, unpaid of course, and the students can't say much because their future depends on it. So before calling simple copyright infringement "slave labor", they should look at their own community. At least the professors whose work is illegally copied are not forced to do it by the ones taking it.
I’d call that the opposite of “suffering”.
The judge had an interesting summary of AI:
"He compared AI training to how humans can read, internalize and remember a book’s themes and style. “Like any reader aspiring to be a writer, Anthropic’s LLMs trained upon works not to race ahead and replicate or supplant them — but to turn a hard corner and create something different,” he wrote."
I do not think training an AI model is Fair Use, because LLM "training" is being used as a metaphor for building a matrix with a computer. Only people and animals train and learn; computers run statistical problems over input, which in this case was illegal input acquired by humans.
But it does not matter whether training LLMs is Fair Use, "Fair Use" is a strange and arbitrary legal term that can be expanded to include AI if we wish. This was organized crime whether or not LLM training on copyrighted materials is fair use. It was organized crime whether or not they planned to use them for AI at all.
AI is irrelevant. They could have trained it on GPL'd or MIT code (as long as they then distributed according to the terms of the licenses), and works in the public domain. They could have gotten what they were doing explicitly declared to be fair use by the Library of Congress, and then purchased the materials, like they are belatedly doing now. It wasn't necessary to violate copyright law to prove the technology. They could have proved the technology, then asked for copyright law to be clarified, and licensed huge volumes of works from the very few publishers we have left. Becoming a criminal organization was an explicit choice they made, and they discussed its illegality, and even the risk that it would be discussed on HN, which might inspire prosecution.
The reason they are not being prosecuted is because the rich are beyond the law; prosecutors will not prosecute them. The RICO statute is clear, and explicitly mentions copyright violation.
We can sentence the executives harshly, but go easy on the lower level people, because they are intelligent and valuable to advance the technology. The executives aren't necessary for anything. They're currently running finance scams that are extremely dangerous for the economy. They belong in prison to protect the public.
This is an option that people (real people, with names) have, and are not taking. When they say that they care about law and order, and are worried about the behavior of these companies, they are lying. Trump could literally nationalize them for what they've done. They're vulnerable to any state's attorney who has any author in their state whose book was downloaded. Libgen/Annas-archive would have been the most important honeypot in history.